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Long awaited Westendorf ski link to SkiWelt in progress

The link is the final part of the jigsaw that will finally fully inter-connect the 250km of piste in the SkiWelt, which claims to be Austria's largest single lift-linked ski area as well as having the country's largest snow making operation.

The new slope does not quite reach the rest of the SkiWelt still and a bus shuttle service currently links its end to the Hochbrixen valley station. For next winter a conveyor lift and a drag lift will transport skiers from the end of the slope in the area of the Brixen bathing lake directly to the new valley lift station. This will be built on the opposite side of the street from the existing funicular station situated on the sunny side. A bridge over the Brixental main road will connect the two buildings.

Like the 600km of the French 3 Valleys, a tally which has remained unchanged for decades regardless of the addition of new pistes, the area continues to claim a total size of 250km of piste, despite having added more than 10km of new piste in recent years. This may be how the apparent failure of maths may add up in the region's claim that,
"In the future, the SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser - Brixental and the Kitzbühel ski resort will be one of the three biggest interconnected ski resorts in the world."

The current sum of SkiWelt 250km + KItzbuhel's 168km = 418km, would place it sixth behind the Three Valleys (600km), Portes du Soleil (650km), Sella Ronda (500km), Milky Way (440km) and Paradiski (425km). Some of those larger claimants are rather tenuous with breaks in the circuit requiring bus links, but currently the SkiWelt-Kitzbuhel link still has a break at Kirchberg where a short bus link is required.

Oddly, the area ignore four of the five larger claimants and says it will be third behind, "the Trois Vallées and the Megéve-Mont-Blanc area," This latter pass is another under construction which would potentially place the SkiWelt-Kitzbuhel link in to seventh position - but it all depends where you take your measurements.